"Dustin J. Mitchell" <dustin AT zmanda DOT com> writes:

> On Nov 11, 2007 1:24 PM, Sven Rudolph <sr1 AT loom.sax DOT de> wrote:
>> following the ideas from the discussion some months ago I implemented
>> just another tool for creating barcode labels for tapes. It is written
>> in Perl and uses the Barcode Writer in Pure PostScript. Currently it
>> creates labels for DLT and LTO (Ultrium). I'd like it to become even more
>> generic, but the way of specifying the label layout is still a bit
>> inflexible. So I first want to show you what I did, and you can tell
>> me what is needed...
>
> Neat!  As I understand it, this is a generic label-printing utility,
> which could be used with any backup software.  The code looks quite
> well-designed and extensible -- quite a feat for this sort of task.
> Are you interested in further integrating it into Amanda?

Currently the only Amanda-specific thing is that you can print a
descriptive label name in addition to the barcode text. In the default
configuration most barcode libraries use only 8 characters, and with
the tape type specifier (like L4, S4) you have only 6 characters. So I
wanted to print the label names used by Amanda (like Set1-Jan-01) on
the label.

> The label-printing that Amanda supports is a bit inflexible -- it's
> treated as a kind of report and (as you probably know) makes some
> assumptions about the format of the postscript template.

I think the barcode labels have another purpose: They identify the
media. Before I amlabel a tape, it gets its barcode label. (And
amlabel (together with the changer script) reads this and stores it in
an internal database.

On the other hand the amreport labels are used to list the content of
a tape. I use them for the off-site tapes in order to make a bare
metal restore (without the index files) easier. So I use both, the
barcode labels and the amreport-generated labels.

I'd be glad to see this used together with amanda, and it could be
good to distribute it together with amanda. But currently I don't see
a way to integrate it more closely.

        Sven
-- 
Sven Rudolph <sr1 AT sax DOT de>                http://www.sax.de/~sr1/